When John Lennon was once asked what it was like growing up in Liverpool, he quipped: “I didn’t grow up in Liverpool. I grew up in Hamburg.” That’s because although the Beatles formed in Liverpool, they learned their craft in the backstreet clubs of the gritty northern German port city

When the Beatles rolled into the shabby dockland neighborhood of St, Pauli in a small van early on the morning of August 17, 1960, Hamburg’s post-war resurgence was just beginning. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, Pete Best and Stuart Sutcliffe, a gang of pompadoured scousers (or Liverpudlians) played their first gig at the Indra, a self-styled ‘music and vaudeville’ club. That evening, at the Indra Club, they were encouraged to raise their game by manager Allan Williams. He encouraged them to “Make it a show, boys!”, a phrase quickly taken up by the club owner, Bruno Koschmider – the cry of “Mak show, Beatles! Mak show!” would become the hallmark of this first Hamburg show.

The boys bunked in a windowless cell behind the screen of a local cinema, the Bambi Kino. According to McCartney, “we lived next to the toilets, and you could always smell them. The room had been and old storeroom and there were just concrete walls and nothing else. No heat, no wallpaper, not a lick of pain with sets of bunk beds with not many covers”

Lennon’s description further painted the picture; “We were living next to the women’s toilet. We would go to bed late and be woken up the next day by the sound of the cinema show. We’d try to get into the lady’s room first, which was the cleanest of the cinema’s lavatories, but fat old German women would push past us.”

After two months of incessant gigging at the Indra, 5-6 hours a night for 30 marks each, owner Bruno Koschmider promoted the Beatles to his flagship club, the Kaiserkeller. The band shared the bill with rival Liverpool group, Rory Storm & the Hurricanes, whose drummer happened to be Ringo Starr. By 1962 Starr had replaced Pete Best as their drummer. 

It's during this period that the Beatles refined their skills as live performers. George Harrison himself called the period “their apprenticeship” and Lennon agreed, “In Hamburg we had to play for hours and hours on end. Every song lasted 20 minutes and had 20 solos in it...…that’s what improved the playing.”

The German language version of “I Want To hold Your Hand” (Komm, Gib Dir Mein Hand) was the only groups recording session that took place outside of the United Kingdom. Odeon Records lobbied George Martin and Brian Epstein that in order for the Beatles to penetrate the German market they would need to record German versions of their biggest songs. The Beatles were opposed the idea until Martin convinced them to do it. In January 1964 they recorded the songs at EMI's Pathé Marconi Studios in Paris, France. 

The songwriting credits on the record are noted as Lennon, McCartney, Nicolas, Hellmer. The German adaptation was translated by Jean Nicolas and Heinz Hellmer.